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Shouldering the past: Photography, archaeology, and collective effort at the tomb of Tutankhamun Christina Riggs University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK Corresponding author: Christina Riggs, Art History and World Art Studies, Sainsbury Centre 0.28, University of East Anglia, Norwich NR4 7TJ, UK. Email: c.riggs@uea.ac.uk Abstract Photographing archaeological labor was routine on Egyptian and other Middle Eastern sites

during the colonial period and interwar years. Yet why and how such photographs were taken is

rarely discussed in literature concerned with the history of archaeology, which tends to take

photography as given if it considers it at all. This paper uses photographs from the first two

seasons of work at the tomb of Tutankhamun (1922-4) to show that photography contributed to

discursive strategies that positioned archaeology as a scientific practice – both in the public

presentation of well-known sites and in the self-presentation of archaeologists to themselves

and each other. Since the subjects of such photographs are often indigenous laborers working

together or with foreign excavators, I argue that the representation of fieldwork through

photography allows us to theorize colonial archaeology as a collective activity, albeit one

inherently based on asymmetrical power relationships. Through photographs, we can access the

affective and embodied experiences that collective effort in a colonial context involved, bringing

into question standard narratives of the history and epistemology of archaeology.

Keywords Archaeological labour, Egyptian archaeology, history of archaeology, history of photography,

Tutankhamun

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The tomb of Tutankhamun is an archaeological discovery more commonly associated

with the glint of gold than the gleam of perspiration. But like all archaeological work in

Egypt, it took place in conditions involving heat, dust, and bodily strain, to which public

and political attention added considerable pressure. Archaeology was in every sense a

contact zone, through which colonialism crept into discursive spaces as well as physical

ones: the sites, storage magazines, and dig houses that defined ‘the field’, and the

transport links, hotels, equipment suppliers, government offices, lecture rooms, and

museums that mediated between field and metropole. This paper revisits that contact

zone through the medium of photographs taken during the 1920s excavation of the

tomb of Tutankhamun, to consider two interrelated questions: how photography

represented the working processes of archaeology, and how photography itself formed

part of the collective effort of archaeology. Without the evidential value of photographs,

much of the labor that went into colonial-era archaeology would remain unknown, in

particular the roles played by indigenous workmen.1 It is the affective value of

photographs, however, that is just as significant for the historiography of archaeology,

because photographs make visible an embodied experience of labor that sometimes

distinguishes foreign archaeologists from indigenous workers – but that also brings

them into intimate proximity, bodies and brains bumping into each other amid the

demands of fieldwork.

The work of excavation was physically and mentally demanding, often taking

place under tight constraints of time and money and in a confined, uncomfortable

working environment. Even the most strenuous or repetitive physical labor, such as

earth removal and heavy lifting, went hand-in-hand with careful scrutiny, always

mindful of a potential new discovery or the condition of artifacts and features.

Moreover, much of the labor of archaeology required manual and intellectual dexterity,

as objects emerged from the ground or the tomb, were cleaned, photographed, drawn,

Notes 1 See Nick Shepherd, “‘When the Hand that Holds the Trowel is Black...’: Disciplinary Practices of Self-

representation and the Issue of ‘Native’ Labour in Archaeology,” Journal of Social Archaeology 3 (2003):

334–52.

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and recorded, then carried, sorted, stabilized, and packed. All these activities required

many more human (and non-human) actors than the heroic white man popularly

credited with archaeological discovery, yet most historical accounts of archaeology in

Egypt perpetuate a narrative that resembles – not coincidentally – late Victorian

adventure tales in the manner of H. Rider Haggard or G. A. Henty.2 The hero may be

flawed, but he perseveres against the odds, his ‘native’ workmen in his shadow and at

his command.

The most famous find of twentieth-century Egyptian archaeology seemed ready-

made for such a narrative: lead excavator Howard Carter had spent much of his career

in the archaeological wilderness thanks to an uncompromising temperament, and his

patron George Herbert, fifth Earl of Carnarvon, was an aristocratic playboy turned

Egyptological dilettante who held the permit to excavate in the Valley of the Kings,

behind the western cliffs opposite the Nile at Luxor – an area many Egyptologists did not

think worth the effort of exploring further. From 1917, Carter and his chief foreman,

Ahmed Gerigar, directed gangs of up to 100 men and boys (some girls, too) in a

clearance operation, shifting tons of sand and rubble to the level of the valley floor.

After the men uncovered the flight of steps and subterranean sealed doorway of what

proved to be Tutankhamun’s tomb, in November 1922, Carter recognized the need for

assistance beyond his solo capabilities and more specialist than what his Egyptian

workmen offered. He quickly assembled a team – as the press would term it –

comprising experts from the prestigious Metropolitan Museum of Art, whose Egyptian

expedition was based near the valley, as well as a British chemist long employed by the

colonial government in Egypt. The identities and careers of most of these men are well

documented, in particular photographer Harry Burton and archaeologist Arthur C. Mace

2 Conventional and empirically driven accounts abound, such as Jason Thompson, Wonderful Things: A

History of Egyptology, 1: From Antiquity to 1881 (Cairo and New York: The American University in Cairo

Press, 2015). For Henty and Haggard, see: Wilson Chacko Jacob, Working out Egypt: Effendi Masculinity

and Subject Formation in Colonial Modernity, 1870–1940 (Durham, NC and London, 2011), pp.32–41;

Roger Luckhurst, The Mummy’s Curse: The True History of a Dark Fantasy (Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 2012), pp.185–207.

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(both British, but employed by the Egyptian Expedition), and the chemist Alfred Lucas.3

Carter assiduously acknowledged their contributions, which were paid for by the

museum and the Egyptian government respectively. Only Carter’s own salary, and that

of his friend Arthur Callender, a retired Egyptian railways engineer, were paid by

Carnarvon, along with the other excavation costs. These financial arrangements, and

distinctions of who worked for whom, mattered a great deal to those involved, despite

the unified face that the terminology of teamwork implied.

In the first two books published about the tomb of Tutankhamun, Carter also

acknowledged his four Egyptian ruʾasāʾ, or foremen (as it is conventionally translated;

the singular is raʾīs), whose names he stated in the prefaces: chief foreman Gerigar, and

foremen Hussein Ahmed Said, Gad Hussein, and Hussein Abu Awad.4 Nowhere else in

the excavation records, photographs, or in press coverage are these men identified by

name, nor their pay arrangements, working schedules, or responsibilities disclosed.

Carter’s diaries and journals record payments for the salaries and household accounts of

his Egyptian domestic staff (whom he referred to collectively as ‘servants’ and

individually by name and/or specific role), but the diaries and journals make only

passing references to any of the Egyptian excavation staff, such as “Paid men for the

week,” or “Paid men & Reises.”5 Other than these cursory entries, no Egyptian field

workers on the ten-year-long Tutankhamun excavation appear in the archive that Carter

3 Burton: Ronald T. Ridley, “The Dean of Archaeological Photographers: Harry Burton,” Journal of

Egyptian Archaeology 99 (2013): 117–30. Mace: Christopher C. Lee, ...The Grand Piano Came by Camel:

Arthur C. Mace, the Neglected Egyptologist (Edinburgh and London: Mainstream Publishing, 1992).

Lucas: Mark Gilberg, “Alfred Lucas: Egypt’s Sherlock Holmes,” Journal of the American Institute for

Conservation 36 (1997): 31–48. 4 Howard Carter and A. C. Mace, The Tomb of Tut.ankh.Amen, Volume I (London, 1923 [2003]), p.xv

[xxvii]; Howard Carter, The Tomb of Tut.ankh.Amen, Volume II (London, 1927 [2001]), p.xxiv. For the

excavation of the tomb, and its immediate impact, see Christopher Frayling, The Face of Tutankhamun

(London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1992); Paul Collins and Liam McNamara, Discovering

Tutankhamun (Oxford: Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford, 2014). For a critical consideration of

the excavation in light of contemporary Egyptian politics, see Elliott Colla, Conflicted Antiquities:

Egyptology, Egyptomania, Egyptian Modernity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), pp.172–210. 5 Carter’s journals and diaries have been scanned and transcribed by the Griffith Institute, Oxford

University: <www.griffith.ox.ac.uk/discoveringTut/journals-and-diaries/>. The quoted references occur in

the journals for the fourth and fifth season, 26 October entries in both cases. For salaries and accounts

concerning the domestic staff, see in particular the diaries of the first (e.g. 1 June entry) and second seasons

(e.g. 1 March, 18 March entries).

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himself maintained; if Carter (or Gerigar, feasibly) used separate registers or account

books to record this information, they have not survived. In the minds of Carter, his

immediate colleagues, and the media and public too, the ‘team’ seems not to have

included Egyptians in any capacity.

Photographs of the excavation show a different story, however. A sizable

Egyptian workforce was essential to the project, from the carpenters who made scores

of trays and crates for the artifacts, to the basket boys who carried rubble to backfill the

tomb entrance, to the experienced men – in all likelihood, the ruʾasāʾ – who were

involved in the delicate task of disassembling the gilded wooden shrines that filled the

burial chamber. Because of the tremendous publicity the tomb generated, a greater

number and diversity of photographs were taken of work in progress on the site than

would have been done for a more conventional excavation. During the first two field

seasons in particular (December 1922 to May 1923; October 1923 to February 1924),

the cameras of tourists and journalists surveilled the site intently; so, too, did the

cameras of fellow archaeologists and team members. In those first two seasons, a

contract between Carnarvon and London’s The Times gave that newspaper and its

sister-publication, The Illustrated London News, privileged access to photographs taken

in the tomb by Burton, as well as other photographs, for instance some taken by

Carnarvon himself. As a result, photographs documenting work in progress at the tomb

of Tutankhamun can be divided for our purposes here into two broadly defined groups:

first, copious photographs taken outside and in the vicinity of the tomb, many of which

became property (at least in print form) of The Times, and second, the Burton

photographs, whose negatives and prints became part of the excavation archive

compiled by Carter – and divided by him between his personal files and albums, now in

the Griffith Institute, Oxford University, and Burton’s employer, the Metropolitan

Museum.6 Taken together with other glimpses – and gaps – in contemporary media

6 Given that multiplicity and reproducibility are inherent to the photographic medium, there is considerable

overlap between The Times’ material and the excavation archive, especially when one attempts to trace

original negatives, copy negatives, and printed images: see Christina Riggs, “Photography and Antiquity in

the Archive, or How Howard Carter Moved the Road to the Valley of the Kings,” History of Photography,

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coverage and in the excavation archives, these photographs allow us to explore the

range of labor that went into the production of knowledge about this fabled discovery.

This paper argues that the representation of fieldwork through photography

makes a strong case for theorizing colonial archaeology as a collective activity

undertaken by foreign and indigenous actors, even as the photographs themselves

speak to asymmetrical power relationships, age-old tropes of the Orientalized Other,

and the complexities of identity and subjectivity in Egypt’s emergent, notionally

independent nation-state. Photography itself thus invites us to question the history and

epistemology of archaeology, not only to produce a counternarrative to conventional

hero–discoverer accounts, but also – and arguably more significantly – to recover and

foreground the affective experiences of labor in a colonial context. After considering the

affective qualities of photographs and photographic images in archaeology, I turn to the

two groups of Tutankhamun photographs described above to look first at how

photography represented the work of archaeology in contemporary press accounts, and

then at how ‘official’ photographer Harry Burton depicted work inside the tomb.

Burton’s own methods confirm the complexities of working relationships in colonial

archaeology, exemplifying the asymmetries of representation and communication

through which the now-familiar tropes of Tutankhamun took shape: the boy-king, his

wonderful things, and the secrets the tomb still promises to reveal, if hero-

archaeologists succeed.7

Archaeological affect

As both a practical technique and a representational practice, photography attests the

collective nature of archaeological effort in colonial Egypt, wider recognition of which

would foster a radical rethink of Egyptian archaeology’s disciplinary pasts and futures –

40 (2016): 267–82. The Oxford and Metropolitan Museum archives also are not identical, despite efforts

since the 1950s to reconcile and equate the two. 7 “What Lies Beneath? A Tantalizing Clue to the Location of a Long-sought Pharaonic Tomb,” The

Economist, 8 August 2015 (print edition; accessed online, <www.economist.com/news/books-and-

arts/21660503-tantalising-clue-location-long-sought-pharaonic-tomb-what-lies-beneath>).

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and of the untapped potential of photography for writing histories of archaeology.8 To

realize this potential fully, however, studies of archaeological photographs must take in

both the evidential and affective values of the images. Photographs are more than what

they represent, and photography is more than a recording device, as a well-developed

body of literature in visual and historical anthropology has demonstrated.9 Trained to

treat photographs as records of fact (the photograph is what the photograph shows),

archaeologists have tended to be less critical of their representational and archival

practices than anthropology, whose postcolonial turn in the 1970s and 1980s can be

attributed in part to its self-conception as a study of people, rather than the ‘things’ that

have been archaeology’s avowed concern. Regardless, photography was central to the

working methods and epistemic priorities of both disciplines as they developed in the

colonial and imperial climes of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Elizabeth Edwards has recently argued that the affective qualities of

photographs, which have heretofore been configured as a polarity to photography’s

evidential, knowledge-producing character, should instead be repositioned in tandem

with the evidence base that photographs created and the meanings they accrued.10

“Photography has always been a social act,” she notes, “bounded to a greater or lesser

extent by power relations,” especially in colonial contexts. Taking photographs, being

photographed, looking at, sharing, exchanging, and copying photographs were such

common activities in the field (whether on site, in the dig house, or traveling to and

from them) that they will have been routine, as were the differences in status and

8 See also Sudeshna Guha, “Visual Histories, Photography and Archaeological Knowledge,” Lalit Kala

Contemporary 52 (2012): 29–40; Sudeshna Guha, “Introduction: Archaeology, Photography, Histories,” in

Sudeshna Guha (ed.) The Marshall Albums: Photography and Archaeology (Ahmedabad, 2010), pp.11–67;

Jennifer A. Baird, “Photographing Dura-Europos, 1928–1937: An Archaeology of the Archive,” American

Journal of Archaeology 115 (2011): 427–46; Frederick N. Bohrer, Photography and Archaeology (London:

Reaktion Books, 2011); Philip Carabott, Yannis Hamilakis and Eleni Papargyriou, “Capturing the Eternal

Light: Photography and Greece, Photograpy of Greece,” in Philip Carabott, Yannis Hamilakis and Eleni

Papargyriou (eds.) Camera Graeca: Photographs, Narratives, Materialities (Farnham, 2015), pp.3–21. 9 Elizabeth Edwards, Raw Histories: Photography, Anthropology, and Museums (Oxford: Berg, 2001);

Elizabeth Edwards and Janice Hart (eds.), Photographs, Objects, Histories: On the Materiality of Images

(London and New York: Routledge, 2004); Christopher Pinney, The Coming of Photography in India

(London: British Library, 2008). 10 Elizabeth Edwards, “Anthropology and Photography: A Long History of Knowledge and Affect,”

Photographies 8 (2015): 235–52.

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power between and among the foreign archaeologists and their indigenous employees.

For anthropology, Edwards uses ‘affect’ to encompass the subjective, embodied, and

emotional experiences of all parties in the fieldwork encounter, to which we can also

add subsequent viewers and users of the photographs. For archaeological photography

in a colonial or semicolonial context – and Egypt in 1922 was arguably somewhere

between the two – what photographic images represent is often a form of presence

glossed over, forgotten, or suppressed in written modes of discourse.

Photographs also give us glimpses of personal interactions, physical contacts,

and haptic details that could not or would not be attested in any other medium: the grip

of hands on tools or equipment; the texture of clothing, scuffed shoes, or (for the

Egyptian workers) bare feet; the pressure of bodies pressing against each other; and,

indeed, the gleam of perspiration on skin or sticking under the arms of a sweat-stained

shirt. Photography does not illustrate the history of archaeology: it is the history of

archaeology and its historiography as well, for as objects and as images, photographs of

work in the field continue to exert an affective response, as anyone who has worked

with them soon discovers, especially in the heightened atmosphere of an archive.11

Dust-covered children carrying baskets of rubble, Egyptian workmen gripping metal rails

under a blazing sun, Howard Carter in tweeds and a bowtie that almost make us itch: for

many reasons, photographs of archaeology often make for uncomfortable viewing, but

they are all the more illuminating for that.

The press gang

Historians of science are accustomed to thinking about knowledge production as a

collective effort, but with a few notable exceptions, histories of archaeology often stop

short of incorporating ‘native’ labor fully within the collective. Either they overlook

indigenous contributions altogether, which is typical in conventional accounts, or they

11 For the distinctive viewing conditions an archive can foster, see Gillian Rose, “Practising Photography:

An Archive, a Study, some Photographs and a Researcher,” Journal of Historical Geography 26 (2000):

555–71; Liam Buckley, “Objects of Love and Decay: Colonial Photographs in a Postcolonial Archive,”

Cultural Anthropology 20 (2005): 249–70.

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are stymied by archival absence. Even where indigenous workers have archival

presence, for instance in archaeological photographs, it may be frustratingly impossible

to identify represented individuals by name.12 The terminology deployed in archaeology,

then and now, confounds us as well: we use ‘archaeologist’ to refer only to the white

men, and a very few women, who ran things in the field and put their names on the title

pages of books.13 Indigenous workers, no matter how experienced and skilled, were not

archaeologists: they were diggers, gangs, men, or (regardless of age) boys, if they were

mentioned at all. These differential terminologies, and the use of collective nouns like

“team” or “gang,” tend to efface all individual contributions to the work of the group.

The effect appears especially invidious where the work of subalterns, who almost

always outnumber foreign specialists, is at stake, yet asymmetry, inequality, and

anonymity were inherent to collective effort, as Bruno Latour has cautioned: “By

collective, we don’t mean an action carried over by homogeneous social forces, but, on

the contrary, an action that collects different types of forces woven together because

they are different.”14

Asymmetries, inequalities, and anonymity suffuse photographs of labor at the

tomb of Tutankhamun, not only between foreign and indigenous staff members, but

between the British or Egyptian participants themselves; social relations were not

binary, but multifaceted. Some of the individuals involved in the Tutankhamun

excavation had known each other and worked together for decades, however different

their individual experiences were or how difficult the interpersonal relationships

enabled (or disabled) by the colonial encounter. Being ‘in the field’ was an embodied

reality, not an abstraction: these men – and some boys – brushed against each other’s

12 On the anonymity of indigenous laborers in archeological photographs, see Nick Shepherd; J. A. Baird.

<add page refs> Some archeological archives do preserve detailed staff registers, even identifying staff in

photographs: Stephen Quirke, Hidden Hands: Egyptian Workforces in Petrie Excavation Archives, 1880–

1924 (London, 2010), <add page refs>.

13 A related observation can be made for the wives (and other family members) of white, male

archeologists, many of whom contributed actively to work such as drawing, cleaning, and cataloging

objects, or cataloging photographic negatives, without being paid or credited as ‘team’ members. 14 Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 2007), pp.74–5.

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clothing and bodies, smelled each other’s sweat, waited, conferred, adjusted,

maneuvered, and balanced, day in and day out for months and years. The split seconds

caught by a camera may be flattened to shades of gray in the photographic image, but

there is a depth and fine-grained texture to the encounters these photographs

represent, well beyond the printed surface. Photographs of work taking place outside

the tomb of Tutankhamun are abundant in two senses, first in terms of the numbers

that were taken (and by multiple photographers), and secondly, for the “plentifulness,

plenitude and potential” it implies in the medium itself.15 Photographs record

unexpected details and random information, an ‘excess’ that frustrated earlier

photographers but offers a boon to researchers now.

From the moment of its discovery, news of this apparently untouched royal

tomb, belonging to an ancient Egyptian ruler hardly anyone had heard of, made

headlines around the world. But it was only two months later, in late January 1923, that

press coverage intensified, at the point that objects began to be removed from the first

of what would prove to be four chambers. The timing of these activities was one factor

in the delay between discovery and the surge of press interest. It had taken Carter

several weeks to make practical arrangements such as security, staffing, equipment, and

nearby storage and workspace. Another important factor was the availability of

photography for the illustrated press, which is my first point of departure. At Christmas

1922, Carnarvon had signed a contract with London’s The Times, giving the paper

exclusive rights to ‘official’ photographs from the tomb and reports of the work, in

exchange for a £7,500 fee and a percentage of the proceeds from selling on the image

rights.16 Inside the tomb, Carter arranged for Burton, staff photographer to the

Metropolitan Museum of Art’s neighboring excavations (and a trusted acquaintance of

long standing), to photograph objects in situ, and again once they had undergone

conservation in a nearby tomb repurposed as ‘the laboratory’. The area immediately

15 Edwards, “Anthropology and Photography” (note 10). 16 For details of The Times’ contract, see Howard Carter and Nicholas Reeves, Tut-ankh-amen: The Politics

of Discovery (London: Libri, 1998); T. G. H. James, Howard Carter: The Path to Tutankhamun (London

and New York, 2001 [1992]), <add page citations>.

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outside the tomb of Tutankhamun was a photographic free-for-all, however; the

cameras of tourists and other news outlets were ever-present, putting many

photographs beyond the control of Carter, Carnarvon, or The Times. As an established

winter resort, the town of Luxor on the opposite side of the Nile was well equipped with

photographic suppliers, where negatives could be printed on photo paper or postcards.

As The Times’ sister paper, the weekly The Illustrated London News, observed in a

February 1923 edition, work on site was accompanied by the “click of the ubiquitous

Kodak,” which the paper juxtaposed with the “constant creaking of the crude water-

wheels which abound in the locality,” contrasting the modern Western technology of

photography with an ageless Oriental primitivism.17

Photographs of the objects being brought out of the tomb focus (or at least

purport to focus) on archaeological objects. But human activity, whether by the

Egyptian workers or the ‘team’, was crucial for the visual interest of reportage from the

site. Harry Burton would eventually take almost 3,000 photographs of the tomb interior

and the objects discovered, scores of which The Times and its affiliates published

throughout the decade-long project. However, the excavation site and its heroic

archaeologists had an instant and topical appeal, as did the high-profile visitors, both

foreign and Egyptian, who came to witness the action. In the first months, and when the

burial chamber was opened in the following season, work-in-progress shots helped

transport readers to the Valley of the Kings by proxy, in the way that mass

communication uniquely enables.

One such photograph, taken for The Times but never published, has a familiar feel

from other photographs and graphic illustrations of physical labor in a colonial context

(Figure 1). Carter, wearing a pith helmet and his usual natty tweeds, stands at the top of

the tomb stairs observing two turbaned Egyptian men as they maneuver one of the

large wooden trays used to ferry objects from the tomb to the ‘lab’. At the top right of

the picture, a third Egyptian figure also stands by, cropped to chest-height by the

17 “The Suggested Pharaoh of the Exodus Causes an Influx into Egypt: Tutankhamen Attracts Tourists,”

Illustrated London News, 10 February 1923, 196–7.

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camera, while at the bottom right, a woman in European dress – possibly Carnarvon’s

daughter – relaxes in one of three wicker armchairs, in shade that makes her folded

parasol unnecessary for the moment. Captured from above, this frozen moment

suggests the British archaeologist supervising while subalterns did the dirty work of

archaeology. But there is more than that in this one photo: Carter and the cropped

Egyptian worker at the top right mirror each other’s stance, which is expectant and alert

as if both are at the ready to assist with the laden tray if necessary. The two men

carrying the tray have adjusted their bodies to keep it level as they crest the stairs, one

with his arms overhead, the other bending forward so that the fragile bouquet inside

(number 18, its inventory card tells us) will not fragment even further. The pith helmet,

parasol, wicker chairs, and fly whisk and carafe at the left of the image, are part of the

material culture of colonial life – and leisure – in hot climates, but there is a sense, too,

that all five people share a focus on object 18, as does the photographer who centered

it in the picture.

[Insert Figure 1 near here.]

Although taken under similar circumstances to those in Figure 1, the photograph

reproduced here as Figure 2 differs in its vantage point – it was taken by an unknown

photographer near the tomb entrance, not from above – and in the way it depicts close

coordination and physical contact between the British and Egyptian workforce.18

Divested of his usual waistcoat, Carter and the same Egyptian man seen bending

forward in the previous photograph struggle together at the top of the stairs with the

side of a gilded, hippo-headed wooden couch. The effort of the work is obvious: a

ticking-covered pillow cushions the weight of the couch on Carter’s shoulder, and the

Egyptian man – likely one of the foremen, judging by his frequent appearance in these

photos – helps lift Carter’s flagging arm. Their intimate contact, hand to arm, knees

almost touching, did not preclude publication of this photograph, whose close-up view

18 The close vantage point at which the photograph was taken suggests that the photographer was a British

or American staff member, possibly Lindsay Hall of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Egyptian

Expedition. I have not been able to confirm this suggestion, however, or to locate a negative of the

photograph.

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lent it an immediacy lacking in the photographs taken from ground level. That the

Egyptian man adopts, literally, a supporting role to Carter may have matched

expectations, and in any case, it is Carter’s face, left hand, and the carved front of the

ancient couch that are in sharpest focus. When The Illustrated London News published

this photograph in a double-page spread on 17 February 1923, its caption simply

identified ‘Mr Carter and an Egyptian’ as the men at work, acknowledging the presence

of the second human being while declining to name him.

[Insert Figure 2 near here.]

A few months later, Carter and Arthur Mace (like Burton, seconded from the

Metropolitan Museum excavations) used the same photograph in the book they rushed

to print about the tomb, this time without either naming the Egyptian man or referring

to his presence.19 Both Carter and Mace will have known this man well and worked

alongside him on an almost daily basis for months. They certainly knew his name, but

they must have assumed either that their readers were disinterested in such a detail, or

that it was inappropriate to the task of archaeological record-keeping and publication.

There is, as Nick Shepherd has observed,

a consummate irony here, that archaeology, a discipline whose methodologies involve maximum physical exertion, hours spent in the pit or at the sieve, so routinely should lose sight of its own conditions of production. Like the clue in a murder-mystery, that which is nearest at hand is least remarked.20

The elision or erasure of indigenous workers, at the point when archaeology was

at its most archaeological – moving earth and revealing objects in an antique land –

takes place in plain sight, thanks to the camera’s (or cameras’) presence and the ability

of photographs, long after the fact, to reveal what otherwise went unnoticed or

unremarked. Ostensibly, The Times’ photographs met public demand for news of the

tomb, while for tourists, official visitors, or the team members themselves, taking

photographs from unrestricted vantage points outside the tomb demonstrated ‘I was

19 Carter and Mace, The Tomb of Tut.ankh.Amen, p.xxxii (note 4). 20 Nick Shepherd, <add page ref>

14

there’. Yet a closer look at how The Times and The Illustrated London News presented

the photographs and described work at the tomb invites us to think about the values

photography helped create and enshrine where the work and, crucially, the results of

archaeological effort were at stake.

Men at work

The image of Carter shouldering the hippo couch with (if my surmise is correct) a raʾīs

was one of seven photographs reproduced across two pages in The Illustrated London

News. The popular paper had featured the tomb of Tutankhamun in almost every

weekly edition since early January 1923. For the 17 February spread, the headline

“Preserving and removing: The delicate task of taking Tutankhamen’s furniture from his

tomb” concisely summarized the images of packing cases, a chariot lashed to a carrying

tray, and the so-called laboratory set up in the nearby tomb of King Seti II, with

cluttered trestle tables and Thonet bentwood chairs pressed tight against the ancient

relief-covered walls (Figure 3).21 In separate photographs, near-mirrors of each other

across the paper’s gutter, Mace and chemist Alfred Lucas appear in the laboratory, each

engaged in delicate work on an object from the tomb, their faces in profile and their

heads angled forward to concentrate on their tasks and tools (a brush for Lucas, seen

here in Figure 4, and fine bellows for Mace). Beneath all seven photographs (a general

view of the valley showing the position of both tombs, the laboratory tomb interior, two

images of transport and packing, and the three photos of Lucas, Mace, and Carter and

the raʾīs), text at the bottom of the spread thematically links them in a tone meant to

instruct as well as inform the reader/viewer:

The work of furniture removal, as understood by archaeologists, is one requiring the utmost care and delicacy, aided by all the resources of science for the chemical preservation of fragile objects liable to crumble at a touch when exposed to the air after 3000 years.

Rather than a mundane task of moving house, ‘furniture removal’ here becomes

21 “Preserving and Removing: The Delicate Task of Taking Tutankhamen’s Furniture from his Tomb,” The

Illustrated London News, 17 February 1923, 238–9.

15

another archaeological specialty, for which the ‘resources of science’ and chemical

intervention must be marshaled on site.

[Insert Figures 3 and 4 near here.]

This emphasis on the scientific nature of archaeology would run throughout the

media coverage of the excavation as well as Carter’s own reports. The exactitude of the

work required expertise, rigor, and vigilance, all of which made it the sole preserve of

the British participants, regardless of their level of education: Mace and Lucas held

degrees, but Carter had little formal schooling, having learned archaeology on the spot

after first working as an archaeological draftsman. The Egyptian workmen, even the

foremen, could not be included in the discourse of science. They stood outside it, not so

much for their lack of education, but for their ‘Oriental’ mindset, a frequent source of

comment by excavators of the time. The director of the Metropolitan’s Expedition,

Herbert E. Winlock, characterized Egyptians and other ‘Orientals’ as inveterate twisters

of facts, while Harvard-funded American archaeologist George A. Reisner was one of

many Egyptologists of the time who scorned Egyptians (“a half-savage race”) as

incapable of self-rule.22 For that matter, Reisner also heaped scorn on Carter, whom he

deemed an inadequate archaeologist with questionable links to the antiquities trade.

Thus did Western archaeologists mark scholarly boundaries between themselves, as

well as between themselves and their Egyptian co-workers.

Every scientist needed a laboratory, and the above-ground chambers of KV15

provided the space needed to repair, record, photograph, and store the objects brought

out of the tomb, which were packed and sent to the antiquities museum in Cairo at the

end of each season. The text accompanying The Illustrated London News spread pointed

readers to the lab’s trestle tables laden with “bottles, wadding, and implements used in

22 Winlock, in Donald Malcolm Reid, “Nationalizing the Pharaonic Past: Egyptology, Imperialism, and

Egyptian Nationalism, 1922–1952,” in Israel Gershoni and James Jankowski (eds.) Rethinking Nationalism

in the Arab Middle East (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), pp.127–49, 133–5. Reisner, in

James F. Goode, Negotiating for the Past: Archaeology, Nationalism, and Diplomacy in the Middle East,

1919–1941 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007), p.88.

16

the processes of preservation” (see Figure 3).23 Regular readers would already have

been familiar with the wadding, for the News had highlighted it three weeks earlier with

a headline announcing that the archaeologists would use 1 1/2 miles of this medical-

grade material to wrap and cushion the objects. To The New York Times, the bandaging

was reminiscent of recent war casualties, a comparison that implicitly likened the

artifacts to wounded soldiers and reinforced the identification of the archaeologists

with scientific, even medical, experts.24 The comparison is also a salient reminder that to

European and American audiences, coverage of the Tutankhamun tomb was a welcome

bright spot in the post-war era, and the first positive press to come out of Egypt in some

time. Tourism to the country had only just recovered from the disruption of World War I

and the country’s 1919 uprising against British military occupation. The military

remained in place, but in February 1922, Britain broke off negotiations with Egyptian

political parties to declare an independent Egyptian state – one in which British

‘advisers’ occupied every ministry, and Britain retained control of Egyptian foreign

affairs and the Suez Canal.25

The political situation was crucial to what would transpire over the course of the

Tutankhamun excavation, and the first two seasons in particular. Archaeology in Egypt

had likewise been disrupted by the war and its aftermath. German excavators lost their

site concessions, for instance, which the French-run antiquities service redistributed to

British and French archaeologists. The service was headed by Pierre Lacau, who had

been unable to take up the post properly until the war ended. In the spirit of the newly

independent state, but also from personal conviction, Lacau planned to restrict the

liberal division of finds that foreign archaeologists in Egypt were used to receiving; some

curtailed their excavations because of this. Carter and Carnarvon, who had held the

Valley of the Kings concession since 1914, expected to receive a portion of the

23 “Preserving and Removing: The Delicate Task of Taking Tutankhamen’s Furniture from his Tomb,” The

Illustrated London News, 17 February 1923, 238–9. 24 Frayling, The Face of Tutankhamun, p.21 (note 4). 25 <Refs, e.g. Goode, new book by Reid>

The classic study of the period remains Israel Gershoni and James P. Jankowski. Egypt, Islam, and the

Arabs: The Search for Egyptian Nationhood, 1900-1930 (New York and Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 1986).

17

Tutankhamun artifacts under the old division terms. So too did the Metropolitan

Museum of Art, hence its initial eagerness to lend staff to the project.26 In the

increasingly fraught relationship between Carter and antiquities officials, in particular

Lacau, one source of tension was Carnarvon’s contract with The Times, which had

offended the Egyptian press and angered rival British and American papers. But another,

though less openly acknowledged, reason for simmering hostilities in the supervision of

the dig was the ultimate fate of the objects being so carefully extricated from the tomb

and preserved with “all the resources of science.”27

With actual and intellectual control of the Tutankhamun artifacts at stake, the

emphasis that Carter and the contractually privileged news outlets placed on the

‘scientific’ nature of the work acquires a particular significance – and the photographs of

men at work likewise. The only ‘scientists’ in the photographs may have been Carter,

Mace, Lucas, and so forth, not the Egyptian workmen, but when Carter spoke on behalf

of science and against the Egyptian antiquities service, he was not speaking against

‘Egyptians’ as a homogeneous group. His target was the Egyptian government, which in

this case included Europeans like Lacau and regional inspector Reginald Engelbach, who

was British. Whatever threat Lacau and his colleagues posed to science is never made

explicit. General incompetence is implied, interference is mentioned, but the real

concern was over changes to the preindependence status quo of Western-led

archaeology in Egypt and, by extension, the prerogative to speak of and for the

country’s ancient past.

Photographing work on site and in the lab thus went far beyond reportage or

proxy tourism. The photographs, as well as the processes of taking, developing, and

distributing them, offered authentication of the archaeological work being done and

demonstrated its scientific nature. To do this effectively, photographs had to depict the

26 Carter consistently emphasized that objects sent to Cairo were there pro tem, in advance of the division,

and after Carnarvon’s sudden death in April 1923, he continued to assert Lady Carnarvon’s expectation that

she would receive a selection of objects. Towards the end of the clearance work in 1929, she accepted

instead reimbursement of the excavation costs from the Egyptian government, nearly £36,000, negotiated

by Carter. James, The Path to Tutankhamun, pp 430-4. 27 “Preserving and Removing,” pp.238–9 (note 24).

18

Egyptian workforce, and could depict Egyptians working alongside foreigners. As long as

a foreign archaeologist was in charge, indigenous laborers could be seen (if not said) to

contribute in some way to the collective effort that was the science of archaeology.

Another issue of The Illustrated London News, from 20 January 1923, underscores the

complex motivations and ascriptions of meanings involved in such photographs, for

beneath the aforementioned headline about miles of wadding, photographs show Mace

or Carter “follow[ing] and supervis[ing]” the “Egyptian bearers,” as one caption has it.

Like Reisner’s commanding and patronizing tone toward his own Egyptian staff

members, this phrasing reveals an existing attitude, but also imposes a hierarchical

stress some of the photographs do not necessarily carry – all the more important, then,

for words to reinforce or impose a contrast between the trustworthiness of the experts

and the lassitude of the indigenes: on the same page, a photograph of Carter and a

topee-clad Callender carrying a tray entirely on their own bears a caption to explain that

the tray holds a “casket of jewels too precious to be entrusted to any other hands.”28

Authentication, authority, scientific rigor, and security: photographing the work of

archaeology enabled archaeology to do many kinds of work, far beyond its purported

remit of discovering, recovering, and preserving the ancient past. Since the first use of

daguerreotypy in Egypt in the 1840s, photographs had documented – and created – a

Western presence in exotic lands, a presence concomitant with mastery, control, and

technical prowess. Even where they show Egyptians and foreigners working closely

together, like Carter and the raʾīs in Figure 2, photographs of archaeology thus tap into a

seam of enduring visual tropes, which work against reading them as collective effort and

instead encourage a reading based solely on inequalities. Those inequalities were real,

without a doubt, but so too was an interest (in every sense) in representing archaeology

in action. The fame of the Tut discovery – and, until the 1924 ‘strike’, the impact of The

Times’ contract – meant that both the British and American team members and the

28 “Retrieving Tutankhamen’s Treasures: ‘1 1/2 Miles of Wadding,’” The Illustrated London News, 20

January 1923, 84.

19

Egyptian workforce were photographed more often, and in a wider array of working

contexts, than on most excavations. For instance, Carnarvon himself photographed the

carpentry workshop tucked into a bay of cliffs nearby, where local carpenters made the

trays, crates, and scaffolding that was essential to the work (Figure 5). The photograph,

which appeared in The Times on 9 May 1923, shows the men and boys awkwardly

paused in their work, tools held up as signs of ‘work’ rather than in any functional

posture. The carpentry trade was the domain of Coptic Christians in this area, hence the

caps the two boys and two tool-wielding men wear; the turban of the man at far left

identifies him as Muslim. The Times makes no mention of this detail, but it encourages

us to broaden our understanding not only of what kinds of work archaeological labor

comprised, but also what kinds of individuals made up the collective whose efforts we

are meant to see but not to recognize. However outward-looking photographs like this

one may appear to be, given that they were made partly with the press in mind, they

were as important for archaeology’s self-understanding, which was by definition ‘self’

not ‘other’. Photography and other methods of visualization were what allowed

archaeology to represent – and replicate – itself as a discipline and, crucially, a scientific

one at that.29

[Insert Figure 5 near here.]

In the archive and in the tomb

As an ‘immutable mobile’, to use the terminology of actor-network theory, photography

was a key act of inscription in archaeological processes.30 The camera, the darkroom,

photographic supplies, the circulation of negatives, prints, and published reproductions

– all were actants in a network, contributing to the collective effort of knowledge

production alongside the human actants captured in the photographs themselves. The

reasons why archaeological labor was photographed are thus inextricable from how it

29 Sudeshna Guha, “Mortimer Wheeler’s Archaeology in South Asia and its Photographic Presentation,”

South Asian Studies 29 (2003): 43–55. 30 Bruno Latour, “Visualisation and Cognition: Thinking with Eyes and Hands,” in Henrika Kuklick (ed.)

Knowledge and Society: Studies in the Sociology of Culture Past and Present (Greenwich, CT: JAI Press,

1986), pp.1–40.

20

was photographed, as well as how these photographs did, or did not, become

incorporated into the excavation archive. In the rest of this paper, I focus on the main

archive associated with the tomb of Tutankhamun, which does not include most of the

photographs discussed above, thanks in part to their status as property of The Times.

Taken together with the material forms of the surviving negatives and prints, this

archival history brings a further dimension to the interrelationship of photography,

archaeology, and what I have been characterizing as a collective, albeit inequitably

credited, effort. As several postcolonial engagements with archives have shown,

collections of documents, photographs, and their archival supports reveal processes of

inclusion and exclusion, ordering and disordering, that draw into question the

assumptions on which disciplinary identities and systems of knowledge have relied.

Excavating the archive offers the possibility of disassembling these systems in the hope

that other histories and alternative ways of knowing may emerge.31

Howard Carter curated his own archive for the Tutankhamun excavation, which

passed on his death in 1939 to the Griffith Institute at Oxford University. It was Carter

who decided which negatives and print albums stayed in his possession, and which were

given to the Metropolitan Museum in New York, since it had lent photographer Harry

Burton to the team. Both exclude almost all the photographs used by The Times and The

Illustrated London News to show work on site. Since Carter had used images of the

hippo couch-carrying in his own book, his access to prints of these photographs, if not

their negatives, was not the barrier; the proprietor of the News was an old friend and –

with Burton – one of the named executors of Carter’s estate. Instead, The Times and The

Illustrated London News images seem not to have been considered worthwhile to

include with the excavation records. Most likely they were the wrong kind of

photograph, neither a record of the objects being carried (which were often obscured

by camera angle or packing materials) nor evidence of more significant archaeological

work. For Carter did incorporate ‘in the field’ photographs in the Tutankhamun archive,

31 Jennifer A. Baird and Lesley McFadyen, “Towards an Archaeology of Archaeological Archives,”

Archaeological Review from Cambridge 29 (2014): 15–33.

21

using a sequence of Roman numbers to distinguish them from the main, Arabic-

numbered series photographs that Burton took for the tomb, its artifacts, and specific

occasions such as the mummy unwrapping or the opening of the burial shrines.32

Before turning to Burton’s own photographs – which are the best known and most

frequently reproduced – we can glean a sense of the Roman-numbered photographs

from one in a series of images taken in May 1923, when crated objects from the tomb

were transported by light rail more than five miles to the Nile river (Figure 6). There,

they were loaded on barges to sail downstream to Cairo. This was a crucial moment: the

archaeologists and antiquities officials, like Engelbach, were anxious about the condition

and security of the objects along the journey, while the question of whether Cairo

would be their permanent home also hung in the background. Carter and Mace (writing

in Carter’s voice) detailed the transport in their book on the tomb, but they did not

include any of the photographs representing it. Fifty Egyptian laborers were involved in

the process, which took fifteen hours over two days. The men laid and re-laid sections of

light railway track as they progressed, an action Carter described as

a fine testimonial to the zeal of our workmen. I may add that the work was carried out under a scorching sun, with a shade temperature of considerably over a hundred [38C], the metal rails under these conditions being almost too hot to touch.33

[Insert Figure 6 near here.]

Reading Carter’s words while viewing these images makes both the reading and the

viewing more uncomfortable. In Figure 6 – negative XV, by his own numbering – a

topee-wearing Carter strides toward the front of the train, perhaps to confer with the

long-robed figure at the far right of the picture (possibly senior raʾīs Ahmed Gerigar,

though it is impossible to confirm this). Alongside the crates of royal treasure are the

Egyptian laborers carrying the tracks, their short shadows signaling the time of day. In

the midday heat, we see where physical collaboration among the collective had its

32 For a more detailed discussion of the archive, see Christina Riggs, ‘Photography and archaeology in the

archive, or how Howard Carter moved the road to the Valley of the Kings’, History of Photography 40.3

(2016) pp 267-82 33 Carter and Mace, The Tomb of Tut.ankh.Amen, Volume I, p.177 (note 4).

22

limits, as if only the body of the ‘native’ was impervious to the biology of burns.34

There is a technical point to be made about ‘work in progress’ photographs like

these, for like all the other photographs discussed so far, they were taken with handheld

cameras, the popular Kodak and something similar. These easy-to-handle cameras lent

themselves to on-the-spot photography and required sheet or roll film or, in some

models, small-format glass negatives, no more than quarter-plate size. In Carter’s

archive, photographs of the sweltering light rail transport come from two different sizes

of film negative, suggesting that there were two cameras in use. Burton himself had

wanted to take movie footage of the transport, but his Akeley motion-picture camera

had jammed while filming elsewhere a couple of weeks earlier. 35 It was perhaps just as

well, since tensions were already emerging between the excavators and the Egyptian

authorities around issues of publicity. The Times’ contract had become a bone of

contention, and sensitivity to this may explain why the newspaper did not print any

photographs from this series, although prints were in their possession. To document the

occasion through photography was nonetheless significant, hence Burton or another

team member seems to have turned to a handheld film camera instead. The use of

cheaper, more portable film was in fact recommended for photographing ‘everyday life’

on all manner of colonial expeditions. In his work at the Giza Pyramids, Carter’s rival and

critic, George Reisner, kept a snapshot camera “exclusively for taking pictures of the

men at work, of people and scenes encountered on our travels, and among the local

inhabitants.”36 For the tourist, the anthropologist, or the archaeologist, photographing

‘the natives’ was best done by hand and on film. There were good technical reasons for

this, but there was also a regime of value at work, just as there was in the way

34 For the differential construction of the ‘native’ body, see Simone Natale, “Photography and

Communication Media in the Nineteenth Century,” History of Photography 36 (2012): 451–6. 35 Letter from Harry Burton (Luxor) to Albert Lythgoe (New York), 1 May 1923. Burton correspondence

files, Department of Egyptian Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art. 36 Peter Der Manuelian and George Andrew Reisner, “George Andrew Reisner on Archaeological

Photography,” Journal of the American Research Center in Egypt 29 (1992): 1–34. Anthropological

expeditions likewise distinguished between different negative sizes and media, depending on the subject

being photographed: Elizabeth Edwards, “Performing Science: Still Photography and the Torres Strait

Expedition,” in Anita Herle and Sandra Rouse (eds.) Cambridge and the Torres Strait: Centenary Essays

on the 1898 Anthropological Expedition (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998),

pp.106–35, esp. p.116.

23

photographs were included or excluded from the archive. It would have been a hassle,

not to mention a waste of larger-format glass plates, to dignify archaeological labor with

the use of a tripod-mounted view camera.

Yet Burton himself did just that. Burton, who worked for the Metropolitan

Museum in Egypt for 30 years, preferred to work with large format, 18×24 centimeter

glass negatives.37 His are the most famous and familiar photographs of the

Tutankhamun excavation, and he was credited prominently in Carter’s books about the

tomb as well as in The Times and The Illustrated London News. With the benefit of

electric lighting in the tomb, Burton also photographed key moments leading up to the

opening of the burial chamber in the second field season, an event eagerly trailed in the

press. Some, but not all, of Burton’s photographs of work inside the tomb were

reproduced in the press and contemporary publications. Unlike other Burton negatives,

which Carter divided between his own records and Burton’s collection for the

Metropolitan Museum, Carter kept for himself all the negatives that show men – usually

including himself – working inside the tomb. Prints of the negatives appear in two (of

ten) albums that Burton compiled for Carter, interspersed among other Burton

photographs of the burial chamber’s distinctive shrines.

Figure 7 is a Burton photograph printed in The Times on 28 December 1923,

showing the demolition of the plastered stone wall separating the first chamber of the

tomb from the burial chamber beyond; wooden planks (courtesy of the carpenters)

protect the burial shrines on the other side. The Times’ caption – “Mr Carter and Mr

Callender at work” – was not unusual in ignoring the presence of the two foremen and a

small boy, perched atop the ancient wooden lintel. For all the brute force the demolition

required, it also needed care and close collaboration between the British and Egyptian

staff. Other photographs in the sequence depict only Carter, at the start of the

demolition, or only the Egyptian workers. This photograph and Figure 8, which are the

last two in the sequence, bring their British and Egyptian subjects together to rather

37 For Burton’s work, see Erik Hornung and Marsha Hill, The Tomb of Pharaoh Seti I (Zürich and Munich:

Artemis Verlag, 1991), pp.27–30; Ronald T. Ridley.

24

awkward effect, although this did not preclude their publication. In fact, The Times

would re-use Figure 8 in 1939 to illustrate Carter’s obituary, cropping it to his upper

body and that of the workman or raʾīs next to him – Carter, the heroic archaeologist, in

action.38

[Insert Figure 7 near here.]

[Insert Figure 8 near here.]

Or was he? In both photographs, only Carter seems self-consciously aware of the

camera’s presence: his pose may look active, but there is no tension in his muscles,

unlike the straining forearms of the Egyptian workman balancing on the wooden beam.

The second Egyptian man, standing in the foreground with his back toward the camera

in both photographs, is the raʾīs who supported Carter with the hippo-headed couch

(Figure 2). Here, his still posture embodies a sense of expectancy, although it conveys

little evident muscular tension. For that, we have to look to the balancing workman and

the two British workmen who wait, backs to camera, to receive the chunks of stone the

Egyptian man is working free; in Figure 7, the waiting man is Callender; in Figure 8, a

man named Richard Bethell, who had joined for the second season’s work. Despite the

valorizing efforts of the tripod-mounted view camera and Carter’s positioning of himself

in front of it, these and other photographs taken by Burton to show work inside the

tomb are not his most successful in technical terms. Figures – usually the Egyptian

workmen – are often out of focus, or where the focus is sharp, it is all too clear that the

figures (like Carter in Figures 7 and 8) are intentionally holding themselves still for the

exposure. With difficult work to be done, those being photographed engaged with the

photographic process in different ways, or not at all.

For a photograph in which all the actors are in sharp focus, Burton took advantage

of a natural pause in the work, as Carter, Callender, and two foremen start to slide the

first section of the outermost shrine forward from the shrine walls – a tense stage in the

task of dismantling these unique objects (Figure 9). In the confined space of the burial

38 <ref> ‘Obituary: Mr. Howard Carter’, The Times 3 March 1939, p. 16

25

chamber, grappling with fragile and heavy gilded wood, both physical and intellectual

coordination were essential: it was Callender, the ex-engineer, whom Carter credited

with the scaffolding, ramps, and hoists eventually needed to dismantle the shrines

around the royal coffins. But it was the Egyptian carpenters who made these structures,

and the Egyptian foremen who undertook the work with Callender and Carter. In the

stillness that worked to the camera’s advantage, we glimpse the constant

communication such delicate work required, as Carter, this time, lays a hand on the

raʾīs’s arm, not for physical support but perhaps to offer a suggestion. The lamplight

Burton has bounced off the ceiling traces the texture of the clothing both men wear and

the weight of Carter’s hand resting near his colleague’s shoulder. For all that the gesture

may speak of guidance and direction from a superior to his subordinate, it is a physical

contact that speaks to close and long acquaintance, too. The Times published this

photograph on 18 January 1924, captioned “Mr Carter and Mr Callender are seen with

native workmen.”

[Insert Figure 9 near here.]

Two months after this photograph was taken, Carter downed tools over his long-

running dispute with the antiquities service, which had had the support of the Wafd-led

nationalist government over issues such as The Times’ contract and who should have

access to the tomb. For Carter, the final straw was the service’s denial of permission for

the wives of British team members to view the royal sarcophagus that had been

revealed in February 1924, after all the shrines were dismantled. Carter resumed work

on the tomb a year later, after the fall of the Wafd government and the election of a

Liberal Constitutionalist government more acquiescent to British interests. From that

point, the antiquities services, rather than Carter, issued bulletins to the press, and

although Carter maintained a close relationship with The Times, including use of

Burton’s photographs, all press coverage was less intense than during the first two

26

seasons.39 Apart from occasional group shots, for instance on the occasion of the

mummy unwrapping in November 1925, and a few carefully staged images of Carter

with the royal coffins the same season, Burton no longer took work-in-progress

photographs.

Instead, Burton focused on what had always been the core of his work: in situ

photographs at stages of clearance inside the tomb, and object photography after the

artifacts had been restored and recorded on index cards. One photograph from the

latter years of Burton’s work on site offers a fitting image to round off this discussion of

archaeology as a collective effort, for it reminds us that photography too was a

collaborative endeavor in the work of archaeology (Figure 10). For prints, which he filed

in albums for Carter and the Metropolitan Museum dig house, Burton cropped the

negative to the bed, removing the number card, the stone walls, the edges of the

backdrop, and the blurred, just-glimpsed figures of the assistants he referred to as his

“camera boys,” regardless of their age.40 Burton is always the only person credited as

the photographer, but he did not work alone. Photographs of Burton at work in Egypt

often show three or four Egyptian men nearby, whose responsibilities will have included

help with set-up, backdrops, and reflectors, but may also have encompassed darkroom

tasks, equipment maintenance, and supervision of supplies. Only one is ever named, not

by Burton but by his widow Minnie, in a letter she wrote from Cairo to his former

employer, Ambrose Lansing, at the Metropolitan Museum in the months after Burton’s

death. It is a revealing letter for what it says about life, and labor, in the contact zone:

The only other person I have heard from of the Luxor staff (except their joint letters of sympathy) was Harry’s Hussein who wrote + asked me to try + help him to find work. But I didn’t know what he was fit for – having, as far as I knew, done nothing but camera work for 20 years or so. He came here to see me the other day + said he was on his way to Suez as he had heard there was work to be found there. Poor fellow – he wept when he spoke of Harry. He told me not to cry. He said “Mr Burton is dead. I too will be dead

39 Donald M. Reid, “Remembering and Forgetting Tutankhamun: Imperial and National Rhythms of

Archaeology, 1922–1972,” in William Carruthers (ed.) Histories of Egyptology: Interdisciplinary Measures

(New York and London: Routledge, 2015), pp.157–73. 40 Harry Burton, “The Archaeologist as Photographer,” The New York Times, 15 February 1923;

reproduced in Polly Cone (ed.), Wonderful Things: The Discovery of Tutankhamun’s Tomb (New York:

Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1976), pp.11–17.

27

soon, + so will you + everyone else. Mr Burton was a good man + he is with god, + you will find him there. He knows where you are + what you are doing.” Don’t you think that was extraordinary? It was just about Kurban Bayrami [the Eid el-Adha], so I gave him a pound (Harry always did) + my blessing. He told me the others were all well, except Mr Winlock’s Salama (I don’t remember him) who had died suddenly recently, but I didn’t understand what he died of.41

[Insert Figure 10 near here.]

Like other wives of the Museum’s Egyptian Expedition staff, Minnie Burton had

accompanied her husband in Egypt for thirty years, living in the dig house and

encountering – albeit in more restricted contexts – many of the same Egyptian

workmen. A relationship of exchange and responsibility clearly existed between Burton

and Hussein, which Minnie as Burton’s widow felt obliged to continue, despite her

evident confusion over Egyptian staff whom Hussein assumes she will remember, and

over Hussein’s own fitness for any form of employment other than an archaeological

dig. Her letter reports a conversation at the heart of the contact zone, where the

asymmetries, inequalities, and differences inherent to collective effort can be seen

behind the camera, as well as in front of it.

Conclusion

Although the tomb of Tutankhamun may have been near-unique for the public interest

its excavation generated, the centrality of photography in the work of the excavation

was not. Through photographs of work at the tomb, their publication in the press, and

their various archival trajectories, we can disassemble the narrative of the hero–

discoverer and scientific objectivity and reassemble in its place a counternarrative that

restores texture, nuance, and complexity to the collective effort of archaeology in the

colonial and semicolonial context of interwar Egypt. Egyptians in their hundreds, and

from across the social spectrum, played fundamental roles in the most famous

archaeological discovery ever made in Egypt. They shouldered their past both literally

and figuratively, from rough laborers to experienced foremen, and from cooks, cleaners,

guards, and soldiers to the tarbush-wearing effendiyya of the new nation-state’s

41 Letter from Minnie Burton (Cairo) to Ambrose Lansing (New York), 16 January 1941; Burton

correspondence files, Department of Egyptian Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art.

28

officialdom, whose Ministry of Public Works (administrative home of the antiquities

service) oversaw it all. Newspaper and excavation archives – in both of which

photographs feature prominently – show this collective effort quite clearly, for all that it

has been underrepresented, if not invisible, in the multitude of books, exhibitions, and

media Tutankhamun continues to generate.42

Why photograph the working processes of archaeology? In this paper, several

answers to this question have emerged through photographs of work in progress at the

tomb of Tutankhamun. Photographs contributed to discursive strategies that positioned

archaeology as a scientific practice defined by rigor, accountability, methodology, and

objective facts. As such, archaeology was also the reserve of white, male protagonists,

depicted (ideally) in photographs in roles of active and accomplished command. But the

abundance of information that photography records, as well as the numerical

abundance of photographs that a famous find like Tutankhamun encouraged, permits a

refiguring of photographic evidence and affect to foreground the collective nature of

archaeological labor and knowledge production. Importantly, photography was itself

one of the working processes of archaeology, regardless of whether ‘work’ was explicitly

the subject in front of the camera lens. Colonial-era archaeology helped create, reify,

and reinforce inequalities and injustices that cast long shadows, for all that the

discipline’s positivist aims and media-friendly pharaohs may seem unperturbed. The

click of the Kodak and the shunt of the dark-slide have left us with photographic

archives rich with potential to reenter the contact zone and retrieve something of the

embodied and emotional experiences it shaped, in all their confusion, discomfort, or

42 For Egypt, the government’s own archives, the Arabic-language press, and any personal archives kept by

Egyptian officials or site workers are another potential, and potentially rich, source of information, but

language and access barriers have placed these beyond my own investigative scope here. Like other non-

Arabic speakers, I am indebted to the scholarship that does draw on Arabic-language sources, such as

Colla, Conflicted Antiquities (note 4); Wendy Doyon, “On Archaeological Labour in Modern Egypt,” in

William Carruthers (ed.) Histories of Egyptology: Interdisciplinary Measures (New York and London:

Routledge, 2015), pp.141–56; Reid, “Remembering and Forgetting Tutankhamun” (note 41). On

photographic archives in contemporary Egypt, see Lucie Ryzova, “Mourning the Archive: Middle Eastern

Photographic Heritage between Neo-liberalism and Digital Reproduction”, Comparative Studies in Society

and History 56.4 (2014) pp. 1027-61

29

tedious banality. Photographers like Burton valued shades of gray. So, sometimes,

should we.

Funding This work has been funded by the following grants: British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship MD140004, Leverhulme Research Fellowship RF-2015-365